The State Of Broadband

Only by keeping pace with the latest in regulations, competition, and technology will companies rise above low-capacity, high-priced telecom networks.

We all remember the bad old days of having to load data into removable media in order to send it off to the data center. After all, it would have taken days to transmit the necessary data over slow telecom links.

Problem is, the bad old days aren't over. Instead of shipping tapes to data centers, organizations now regularly ship entire hard drives to cloud providers. Despite tremendous advances in line speeds, it still can take a week or more to transmit very large data sets, even if your line speed is 10 Mbps. Of course, companies don't regularly need to transfer terabytes of data over the internet, but the current level of sneakernet that's necessary for the transfer of even a few hundred gigabytes seems a bit high for the 21st century.

The state of broadband matters to your organization. There's been considerable consumer interest over the past several years, culminating in an FCC plan announced earlier this year to expand broadband coverage and speeds and promote competition. IT organizations can benefit by staying in touch with those regulatory issues, as well as taking advantage of new technology trends, such as wireless broadband, and partnering with alternative providers and municipal networks that buck the status quo. There are clearly risks in doing so, but taking no action almost guarantees that enterprise IT, with pockets of presence in rural and other nonurban areas, will continue to be held back by low-capacity, high-expense networks.

There are many reasons why the state of consumer broadband should matter to enterprise customers:

Respondents are on a roll: 53% brought their private clouds from concept to production in less than one year, and 60% ­extend their clouds across multiple datacenters. But expertise is scarce, with 51% saying acquiring skilled employees is a roadblock.